Messing Around with Dave’s OPML App

Thoughts

Laszlo Systems Chimes In

On of the guys from Laszlo Systems chimes in on our discussion.
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Mail.app question

Since upgrading to Tiger I've noticed that the new Maill app doesn't give the reassuring swosh sound when you send an email. I don't see a setting for it in the prefs. Does anyone know if it's possible to get this back? I know the email gets sent, but I like the audible cue. Especially when sending large attachments because they can take a few seconds to go.

Market Opportunity

This feels like one no?

CaseDetective Released

Ian Jones has released CaseDetective, a tool to extend the capabilities of FogBugz 4.0. Congrats Ian!

One suggestion, you should probably have a corporate per user license because I could see shops wanting to outfit all their developers with this and having no option for it implies that it's not intended for use that way.

Keep us updated!

Cutting Down on Support Back and Forth

This is kind of crazy. Dave just pointed to his "how to" for bug submission.


http://support.opml.org/2005/06/17#bug

His 1.2.3 steps basically mimmic a feature of HelpSpot exactly. Cool, I guess that means I'm on the right track. Basically in HelpSpot the web form where you can submit a request has 2 views (administrator selectable). Either a simple form box like you usually see or 3 form boxes that basically walk the user through the exact sequence Dave points out. It's an option because the 3 steps aren't always appropriate in all circumstances. It's a little more work for the user up front, but providing this framework tends to coax out the real information you need and therefore lessen the back and forth aspects of customer service.
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Joel on Programmers

I just read Joel's article on hiring great programmers. I'm not sure if I agree with him or not, because I don't really understand his argument. Follow along with me for a moment.

His main point seems to be that you need to hire the best programmers to succeed. I agree with that, but I think we have different takes on what that is and in fact I think he might not even be sure what that is.

He starts off ok by making that point and using data from a tough college class to show how the best programmers are more productive. However, here's where he starts to fade a bit. He goes on to talk about great products and implies these were created by great programmers. He uses WinAmp and the iPod as examples. He points out details like how the WinAmp site had this quote on their feature list "Most things actually work!" and how the iPod makes a nice clicking noise because Apple spent extra $ to put a speaker in the body of the iPod and not just send the sound through the headphones. I'm with him on all that, but I don't follow how these things are correlated.

It sounds to me like these products were created by people who are extraordinarily creative and have excellent knowledge of their markets and what appeals to users in those markets. So programmers who can build a command line shell or code a new version of Make for their college class faster than another student aren't necessarily the best programmers to hire. In many cases the most technically proficient programmer will not be the best to hire, because in my experience these people tend to be unable to step out of their programming shoes and into the users. I think you can see this in alot of open source applications, where the technology is first rate but the user experience is poor.

Anyway, maybe that is what Joel is saying, but I don't think he came across as clear as usual in this essay.

Laszlo

Catching up on my blog reading, I noticed the post from Michael about using the Laszlo flash framework. I looked at Laszlo a while back when they first open sourced it. While it seemed interesting, I personally have some concerns about an application nobody wanted to buy. Perhaps it was because nobody wanted to use it and if that's the case making it free doesn't necessarily fix that. Using something like that is a bit too much risk for me in terms of creating a nearly full flash interface, but I'll be interested to see how it turns out for Michael.

Pictures

A few pictures of my trip:





















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viemu released

NGEDIT Software release viemu a vi emulator for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. J from NGEDIT is a reader of this blog. Great to see him get his first product out. Good Luck!
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Boston

I'm in Boston for a few days. Not the best timing, but it was planned a long time ago. I could use a break anyway. I haven't really taken a day off in months. Be back Tuesday.

Empower ISV Arrived Today

If you're doing development of just about anything on Windows you need to get into the Empower ISV program. For $375 you get just about every major product MS makes. I just put it all together into a nice little binder they send. It's about 20 DVD's plus updates for up to 2 years.

Joining is a little painful only because the web form they make you use is awful, also you have to become a partner first (free) then you can register to join the Empower program. Anyway, now I can start full on testing of Win Server and SQL Server so this should be fun.
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Database App Tip

Building a web based database application? Are the database key's shown to users at any point in the process? Here's a tip. Nobody wants there application to seem new to their customers/users. So when you install the tables set the primary key to a value higher than 1. HelpSpot's requests start with 1240. In mysql the command is: "ALTER TABLE TableName AUTO_INCREMENT=1240"

Weblog Footnotes

Good stuff over at the Fireball about using footnotes in weblog posts. I really need to implement this so I can stop writing side comments in parentheses all the time. I just put this on my todo list, it's number #4563 :-(
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How Blogging Really Pays Off

There's always alot of talk about how to make money with blogs. While I think some people will do OK with advertising and such, the real money is and will continue to be in the indirect benefits of blogging. So not getting paid for blogging, but rather the opportunities it provides you. So in my case, have this blog has lead to a mailing list for my upcoming product which is many times bigger than I had anticipated. Of course I still have to "close the deal" to make the $ but I now have more opportunity than I would have without blogging. Another example of this hit my news reader today.

Bill Scott, a fellow who works at Sabre (it's a GDS, I don't have the heart to explain it but if you feel like being scared go read the history) and one of the developers of the upstart RICO AJAX library is leaving Sabre to join Yahoo. And get this, his job is going to be AJAX Evangelist! I have no doubt that he got this job at least in part to the great job he does on his blog talking about RICO and AJAX. How better to prove you know your stuff AND you can evangelize it?
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Feedburner responds

Jessica from Feedburner comments on my last post. Good job! It's always hardest to give good service to people who are leaving your product or service, but it's just as important as providing new customers good service.

Feedburner Go Bye Bye

I just killed my redirection to feedburner. Hopefully you're seeing this post! It just didn't seem worth it. They basically only give you one stat and the odd variations in numbers make me feel like they don't do a much better job in counting than a regular weblog analyzer. Luckily I knew enough to do the mod-rewrite stuff so I easily switched back. I could see the huge lock in there for others who don't know or have access to that.

Why Gnome Can’t Make it To Your Desktop

Interesting post by Joshua about some things going on on the Fedora mailing list:

"I’m not sure why someone who uses the computer for surfing the net, checking email, and writing papers would want to learn these commands, but a very vocal group of people on fedora devel thing were doing them a disservice by not making them memorize them."

You should read it, but in summary he's wondering how these folks who say they want Linux on the desktop are ever going to get there. The answer is that they won't. He dances around the reason why, but luckily for you I know why!

It's because there's no USERS in the process. Sure the developers "use" it but that doesn't count. The guys are hard core talented programers, but that's the problem. There's nobody around to say "hey what's that big E do" or "why isn't there a little disk icon so that I can save my work?". And the reason there's no users is because there's no ways for regular users to get involved at a fundamental level.

If you've ever looked at one of those mailing lists you know that they can't go there. Same with the forums.

So here's the kicker. They'll never get on the desktop because they have no offices, they're entirely virtual. This gives MS a huge advantage. Why? Because at this point Microsoft is comprised as much with non technical workers as tech. So when the programmers get out of line some guy from marketing who only uses Word is there to say "I don't get it". That's a very important function, because if he doesn't get it then alot of other people don't either. MS has a built in way for users to get involved, where as OS Linux developers don't.

I know what you're thinking, that's the kind of stuff that leads to crazy wizards and overly simplified UI. True, but that's way better than a UI where you have to be a geek to understand that dropping down to the command line and using cp is superior to copy and pasting your file between folders.

Murphy Strikes Back

As Raza just pointed out in a comment, I've been silent the past few days. Unfortunately this was due to a hard drive failure on my G5 Friday morning. I've been recovering since then. I had backups and the few things I didn't have backed up I was able to restore. Plus while all this was going on I figured it's a good time to redo alot of stuff. So I purchased 2 200gb drives and set them up in RAID 1 (mirrored) so that this never happens again, I purchased and installed tiger (which makes doing RAID very easy), I installed all the latest version of all the software I use and so on. I don't really have the heart to go into all the details, it's been to traumatic but I do want to point to a few excellent pieces of software which saved my butt.

1. SuperDuper - which makes it super easy to create full backups of your system. Not just backups but 100% complete and working copies. This really saved me because I had this backing up to a firewire drive. So when the main drive died I was able to still boot the computer by holding down "t" during startup which made the mac boot from the firewire drive. Worked perfect. That let me install:

2. Data Rescue X - which did an amazing job of going through the dead drive and finding everything that was recoverable. I only had a week or so missing from the backup, but there were some important things there that I needed. It was amazing, because the drive wouldn't mount, but Rescue X was able to get on there and pull back that data that wasn't destroyed.

I'm just getting things rolling again now. This set me back a few days, but hopefully I've got everything covered now. I've moved into full paranoia mode with the RAID, plus firewire backup, plus I wrote scripts to move critical data to the server. I should have been more thorough before, but that's how it goes.

Why There’s Still Money in Web 1.0

There's been a bunch of talk on the blogs lately about Web 2.0 and the new (not really new, but they are hot) technologies like AJAX and so on. All I want to say in this post is for everyone to not for get that MOST of the money is and will be in Web 1.0 applications for some time. Most companies I've talked with, read about or in anyway know about are still wrapping their minds around Web 1.0. They still don't have most of their internal applications webified, they still send paper checks to their employees, they still use physical timeclocks, they still have you make reservations by calling someone. So while all us geeks get caught up with nifty AJAX widgets let's just not forget that those things aren't going to be on any companies "required features" list for a long long time.

That doesn't mean this technologies and their exploration aren't important or that some folks won't make money with them (see 37signals). Just that most companies simply want help webifying their current infrastructure. They want reliability and support. You don't need these new riskier¹ technologies to make money and be in business. If it's the right thing to do for your business then great, but there's no need to feel like you have to use them or you'll be behind. The fact is that if you even know about this stuff you're still way way ahead of most businesses out there. And hey just look at Ebay. One of the biggest companies in the world, a company that helped create what the web is today still has a site out of 1995.

1. In the sense that they're less tested as well as the fact that you have less experience using them.